5 Questions Your Company Should Ask When Looking for a Data Center

By: Scott Palsgrove

Looking for a data center?  Since business success so often relies upon the effective use of technology, whether to perform daily tasks or to create and deliver mission-critical services, a great technology partner has become a vital necessity.  Typically companies ask their potential data center partners excellent questions about the facility's power redundancy, security, and network connectivity, but with today's IT mission criticality, these features have now become the minimum bar for most data centers.

In addition to those standard questions, it is important to ask the following questions to ensure you are selecting a flexible, affordable data center solution positioned to be a foundation for your company's IT growth. By asking these five simple questions you can better understand the prospective data center's ability to host your infrastructure now but more importantly in the future.  Knowing the facility's capabilities and how they impact your environment will help keep from having to make costly and risky moves due to lack of resources and help to avoid constraint on IT deliverables.

Here are five questions that you need to ask when looking for an enterprise data center for your company.

1) How many watts/amps of usable power can I consume per cabinet?

This is important for a number of reasons, but primarily to determine if you can fully utilize your cabinet today and into the future. It's important to specify usable power because some facilities will say "60 amps per cabinet" but what they really mean is 30 primary and 30 redundant amps. You should also specify 'consume' as some facilities will allow you to install any circuit you want, but limit your draw to just a portion of those circuits.

2) Does the data center offer a power metered billing method or flat-rate?

A metered method of billing power allows you to pay for only what you consume rather than pre-buying the entire circuit capability and using only a portion, which drives up your real pre-amp cost. A true consumption model will allow you the flexibility to install power circuits that will meet your future power needs without a premium today.  For example:  If you plan in two years to consume 14 kW per cabinet then install the proper outlets that allow for that consumption today.  This will reduce setup fees and the time to install resulting in a lower total cost of ownership.

3) Is the data center in a single floor, single tenant building?

Operating a data center is all about controlling risk; multi-tenant buildings make that nearly impossible. For example, if your data center is on the fifth floor, how do you ensure that a water leak on the floor above will not affect your operations?

4) What free services are included (loading dock, reboots, monitoring)?

Don't underestimate the costs you'll incur for extras. You may only need 3 reboots per month now – and that's fine until something happens and you need 20. It's not about the first invoice; it's about the total cost over the course of the relationship.

5) What are the tools the data center can offer to help with your growth? (SAN, data backup, server management, monitoring, cloud services?)

For example, if a server goes offline at 2AM, does the data center have 24/7 on-site staff with the skills needed to resolve the problem?

About the Author

Scott Palsgrove joined Net Access during its first year of operations and has over 15 years of sales and technology management experience.  As Sales Manager, Scott has helped to develop flexible and innovative products and services that have resulted in accelerated sales revenue growth.  Scott is responsible for sales and product strategy, marketing, and partner development.